Speaking to the Georgia Republicans at their state convention Saturday about the need to bring minorities into the party, Gov. Nathan Deal cited what he called a “shocking” statistic: 56 percent of students in the state’s public schools aren’t white.

Actually, you would have to live in a very lily-white enclave to be very shocked. Considering the dramatic demographic shifts which have taken place in recent years and the fact that whites comprise by far the highest percentage of students attending private schools in the state, it’s no surprise non-white students make up the majority in public schools.

But there’s another statistic that many in the state might really be shocked by. In the recent U.S. News and World Report ranking of the nation’s public high schools, the top three schools in the state, and seven of the top 10, have student bodies in which whites aren’t in the majority.

Not only are the top-ranked schools in this survey very diverse, there’s a lot of diversity in their diversity.
The school ranked first in the state — and third in the nation — is the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology. Asians are 40 percent of the student body, followed by whites with 29 percent and African-American students at 18 percent.

At the DeKalb School of the Arts, the second-ranked school, African-Americans are 65 percent of the student body and whites 30 percent. At the third-ranked school, Davidson Fine Arts in Augusta, there are slightly more white students — 44 percent — than African-Americans — 42 percent. That school has 4 percent Asian and 3 percent Hispanic students.

The subject being education, there are caveats. SchoolDigger.com, another outfit which ranks public schools, has a different list in which nine of the top ten schools are majority white, including the three that were ranked in the top 10 by U.S. News and World Report. (However, the school which ranked 2nd on this list, Early College High School at Carver in Atlanta, has a student body which is 97 percent African-American, and according to the site, no white students.)

One difference in the two rankings is that SchoolDigger.com only considers what are now called “regular” or “traditional” schools, while U.S. News and World Report includes magnet and charter schools.
But U.S. News and World Report also includes “regular” schools like No. 8 Norcross High School, where the balance is 32 percent Hispanic, 32 percent African-American, 24 percent white and 8 percent Asian. And No. 9 Duluth High School, with 26 percent Hispanic, 25 percent white, 23 percent African-American and 21 percent Asian. Another difference is that U.S. News and World Report considers whether disadvantaged students, either low-income or minority families, are doing better than the average students in those categories. But the first criterion is how they compare to the overall average in their states.

Among the “traditional” public high schools, majority-white schools like Lambert High,which was featured in a recent AJC article, still hold most of the top places in the state Department of Education’s College and Career Ready Performance Index. But the rapid rise of schools like the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology point toward in which there will be a much wider diversity among those who will get the top college and graduate school placements, and go on from there to the best business and professional opportunities.
Any way you shake those numbers, they amount to a sea change in the way in which performance in secondary education would have been assessed in this state 15, or 10, or even five years ago.And that has major implications for the state’s economic and political future.

“If you want to know what the future electorate of Georgia looks like, look at those who are in the schools right now,” Deal told the Republicans last weekend.

By the same token, if you want to know who’s going to be making the biggest campaign contributions, who’s going to have the biggest influence in their communities and who’s most likely to be tapped for the most important appointed and elected positions, look at who’s attending those schools performing at the highest level. That profile is changing in a way that will surprise a lot of Georgians.

Tom Baxter has written about politics and the South for more than four decades. He was national editor and chief political correspondent at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and later edited The Southern Political Report, an online publication, for four years. Tom was the consultant for the 2008 election night coverage sponsored jointly by Current TV, Digg and Twitter, and a 2011 fellow at the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. He has written about the impact of Georgia’s and Alabama's immigration laws in reports for the Center for American Progress. Tom and his wife, Lili, have three adult children and seven grandchildren.

{{“Speaking to the Georgia Republicans at their state convention Saturday about the need to bring minorities into the party, Gov. Nathan Deal cited what he called a “shocking” statistic: 56 percent of students in the state’s public schools aren’t white….”}}
{{…”Actually, you would have to live in a very lily-white enclave to be very shocked. Considering the dramatic demographic shifts which have taken place in recent years and the fact that whites comprise by far the highest percentage of students attending private schools in the state, it’s no surprise non-white students make up the majority in public schools.”}}
…Well it’s no surprise to you as a journalist who covers the state like morning dew.
But it is a surprise to many in this state, including many of those in positions of leadership.
One might also suppose that the statistic that 56% of all public school students in the state of Georgia are minorities might be a “shock” to many in the Georgia Republican party that Governor Deal was addressing.
That’s because, despite the increasingly-diverse population of the state of Georgia, the leadership of the Georgia Republican party that thoroughly dominates the state’s political scene remains overwhelmingly white and male, though there have been women rising into leaderships positions in recent years.Report

{{““If you want to know what the future electorate of Georgia looks like, look at those who are in the schools right now,” Deal told the Republicans last weekend…..”}}
That was a very good comment and a very prescient statement by Governor Deal as Georgia speeds towards becoming a majority-minority state where non-white minorities will make up a majority of the state’s population.
One major example at the dramatic demographic changes that Georgia is undergoing is in the metro area’s and the state’s second-largest county of Gwinnett where county government offices and the county’s political scene is thoroughly-dominated by white Republicans.
Currently all five seats of the Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners and an overwhelming majority of the county’s state and federal legislative delegations are made up of white Republicans.
Gwinnett County is also home to the state’s largest cluster of Republican voters as more people in Gwinnett vote Republican than in any other county in the thoroughly Republican-dominated state of Georgia.
What is so ironic is that only 43% of the population of Gwinnett County is non-Hispanic white, the remaining 57% of the population of Republican-dominated Gwinnett County are minorities.
Republicans, who don’t have the best relationships with non-white minorities, to put it very-nicely, have every reason to be alarmed that minorities (with whom the GOP does not have the best voter relations) make up a very fast-growing majority of the very-large and very fast-growing population of the most-dependably Republican county in the state.Report

{{…..”By the same token, if you want to know who’s going to be making the biggest campaign contributions, who’s going to have the biggest influence in their communities and who’s most likely to be tapped for the most important appointed and elected positions, look at who’s attending those schools performing at the highest level. That profile is changing in a way that will surprise a lot of Georgians.”}}
…A major current example of how that profile is changing is Rockdale County, Georgia where the county’s political scene has gone from being dominated by white Republicans to being dominated by black Democrats over the past couple of election cycles.
A stark change which has undoubtedly been propelled by the fact that Rockdale County has gone from having a population that was 90% non-Hispanic white in 1990 to having a population that is almost 60% minority in 2012.
Besides East Metro Atlanta suburb Rockdale County and the dominant Northeast Metro Atlanta mega-suburb of Gwinnett County (and the urban core counties of Fulton, DeKalb and Clayton), other Metro Atlanta outer-suburban counties where minorities are either on the verge of being a majority of the population or just recently became a majority of the population are:
…Douglas County, where minorities have grown from being only 10% of the county’s population in 1990 to being 51% of the county’s population in 2011 (President Obama won 51% of the vote in Douglas County in 2012)
…Newton County, where minorities have grown from being only 23% of the county’s population in 1990 to being 48% of the county’s population in 2011 (President Obama won 50.45% of the vote in Newton County in 2012)
…Henry County, where minorities have grown from being only 12% of the county’s population in 1990 to being 48% of the county’s population in 2011
…Politically-dominant mega-suburb Cobb County, where minorities have grown from being only 14% of the county’s population in 1990 to being 44% of the county’s population in 2011 (Cobb County is notable because of the county’s traditionally legendarily (or infamously)ultraconservative politics that have earned it the nickname of “The Center of the Republican Universe”).Report